The paper puts the outcome during the most recent financial crisis in a historical perspective by taking a closer look at the frequency of extreme events in the economic history of Denmark, in some cases based on time series back to the late 1600s. We focus on the frequency distribution of a...

In this paper, we analyze the role bank capital played in systemic banking crises and in lending expansion and contraction for nearly 150 years in Spain. We first build a measure of capital ratio (i.e., the capital to assets ratio) for Spain's banking sector, starting in 1880. Then, we analyze...

Identifying market crashes can be problematic. In a stable financial environment, the same price variation in percentage will result in greater negative impact than during a highly volatile period.In order to take into account changes of volatility throughout time, a new method is proposed, one...

Les krachs boursiers sont décisifs car ils représentent une part importante de la valeur finale d'un indice boursier. Mais, une variation d'un pourcentage identique n'a pas le même impact dans un environnement financier préalablement stable ou hautement volatile. Pour appréhender les krachs...

Why do some banks fail in financial crises while others survive? This article answers this question by analysing the effect of the Dutch financial crisis of the 1920s on 142 banks, of which 33 failed. We find that choices of balance sheet composition and product market strategy made in the...

We use the German Crisis of 1931, a key event of the Great Depression, to study how depositors behave during a bank run in the absence of deposit insurance. We find that deposits decline by around 20 percent during the run and that there is an equal outflow of retail and nonfinancial wholesale...

Despite France's importance in the interwar world economy, the scale and consequences of the French banking crises of 1930–1931 were never assessed quantitatively due to lack of data in the absence of banking regulation. Using a new dataset of individual balance sheets from more than 400...

This paper analyses the evolution of the safety and soundness of the European banking sector during the various stages of the Basel process of capital regulation. In the first part we document the evolution of various measures of systemic risk as the Basel process unfolds. Most strikingly, we...

In May-July 1931, a series of financial panics shook Central Europe before spreading to the rest of the world. This paper explores how the 1931 Central European crisis propagated to the London and New York financial centers; it also examines the role of cross-border banking linkages in...

This article investigates the impact of the socioreligious segregation of Dutch society on the asset allocation choices of rural bankers and the withdrawal behavior of their depositors during the early 1920s. Results suggest that cooperatively-owned Raiffeisen banks for both Catholic and...